On September 4, Macklemore opened for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, telling the crowd he had joined the tour to stand in stadiums like that one and say two words: “Free Palestine.”
He then performed “Hind’s Hall” with footage from Gaza on the screens, and the next night, he did it again.
That weekend, IAC launched a petition asking Sheeran, his promoter, and the venues to remove him from the remaining dates, and more than 18,000 people signed while more than 11,000 clicked through to write to MetLife Stadium.
On September 14, Macklemore announced he was off the tour after a phone call from Robert Kraft.
Since then, some community members have asked me a version of the same question: if one phone call from Kraft settled it, did the petition matter at all?
I understand the instinct, but it measures a signature by one standard only – did it decide the outcome? – and by that standard, almost nothing an ordinary citizen does matters, since one vote rarely decides an election, and yet no one concludes that we should stop voting.
We vote, write, sign, and show up not because any single act settles the question, but because a public that acts is a public decision-makers must account for, while a public that doesn’t can be ignored.
That is the lesson I want our community to take from this month, and it is the opposite of the one some are drawing.
Most of us don’t own a stadium, and most of us will never make a phone call that changes a tour, so if the takeaway is to wait for someone with that kind of power, we have taught thousands of people that their job is to watch.
What most people do have is a name, a phone, an inbox, and a vote: they can sign, they can write to a venue, a sponsor, a school board, a member of Congress, and they can show up to a meeting and speak for two minutes.
Those are the tools of citizenship, and too many people don’t know they have them, or don’t believe they count.
That is why creating a petition matters, not only signing one, since it is a door that shows someone who has never acted what acting looks like.
I believe that if 100,000 people had signed, the tour would have felt it, with or without Kraft, because venues, promoters, and sponsors answer to audiences, and even a call like Kraft’s carries weight only because a community stands behind it.
Look at who never asks whether speaking up is worth it: Macklemore doesn’t own a stadium either, yet he treated a stage as a tool and said so.
He didn’t need 10 shows; he needed two – and when he was dropped, Finneas, Lukas Graham, and other supporting acts withdrew in protest, with no one on that side debating whether their statements “mattered.”
They act first, and they don’t wait to be sure it will work.
Your voice matters
I came to New York 17 years ago, at 27, as a lawyer, knowing almost nothing about Jewish life outside Israel, and what struck me was how much this community did for Israel, and how much of it rested on ordinary people.
Yes, some donors gave $18 million, but there were also thousands who gave $18, and no serious fundraiser has ever concluded that the $18 gifts don’t matter because the $18 million gift closed the campaign.
Some $18 donors will always stay $18 donors because that is what they can afford or the level of their interest, while some will grow into major donors. And either way, the community needs them, and it needs the first gift that brought them in.
A public voice works the same way: some signers will always be the person who does the 30-second thing because that is the time they have, while some will grow into leaders because someone handed them an easy first step.
Both count, and neither happens if no one asks.
So ask yourself: When the next fight comes (and it will), who will already know how to write the letter, who will know where the meeting is, and who will believe their name counts?
Sign. Write. Show up. Not because your voice alone decides the outcome, but because a community that waits for someone else to do the work has already decided it.
The writer is the chief operating officer of the Israeli-American Council (IAC), which launched the petition calling for Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour and represents more than 150,000 Israeli-Americans nationwide.
